That is just sad.
I've been a longtime signal user (since the textsecure/redphone days). I've always given moxie a pass on his controversial decisions (no federalisation, no 3rd party clients, no fdroid repo, relying on Google play services, being slow to release serverside source code) because the team was small and obviously had to cut corners somewhere.
But learning that they spent their time adding support for a (premined?) cryptocurrency just because it's Moxie's pet project is disheartening. What are the odds that this would've been merged into the project if it had been a merge request opened by someone from the outside?